IDK how many people care about dead malls, but that last post about the Collin Creek mall really made me sad. Look at these two pictures:
The top one is from when the mall opened in 1981, the second one is from 2018 (it closed a year later). I think these pictures are both showing the Dillard’s mall entrance, but from different angles.
The 2018 picture represents how the mall more or less always looked since I started going there in 2004, except without people or stores. I never knew there were indoor waterways and fountains. Look at the seating area/playground in the 2018 picture — it’s built over where the waterway used to be. Look at the weirdly protruding concourses on the second story that used to be balconies.
The 1981 mall would have been a beautiful place to go, especially in summer when it’s too hot to spend time outside in Texas. You could walk along the waterway or sit at the tables and have a gorgeous view. It’s almost like a park. I didn’t even recognize the mall when I saw those photos, because all I ever knew was the bland white building that it became.
I don’t know what the moral of the story is here, because I’m sure those waterways were wasteful and expensive to maintain, and there were almost certainly other factors in the mall’s decline besides the visual downgrade. I just wish I could have seen it in its heyday.
I think that Kris actually is possessed by something other than the player.
To be clear, I'm not talking about the Weird/Genocide/Snowgrave route, or about anything that happens during gameplay. Pushing Noelle to proceed, her hearing a creepy voice that doesn't belong to Kris - all that shit is on you. Like in Undertale, the fact that the player controls the player character is a central mechanic of the universe.
But them ripping out their soul and opening dark fountains? That isn't really them. And given that I'm a person who absolutely hates the "blame everything on Chara possession" attitude that plagued Undertale, as you already know if you've been following me for a while, you know that I wouldn't believe this if there wasn't evidence for it.
So here's the deal.
In Chapter 1, when we saw Kris tear their soul out of their chest and stuff it into a birdcage, everyone — including myself — saw this as a way of asserting their independence from the player: they no longer want you to control them. But in Chapter 2, when we saw them do it again not once but twice, some odd details stood out to me.
The first thing is the way they move when it's happening. We see Kris walk on their own during cutscenes and such, and they never do it with their head down and their legs splayed out, shuffling along like a zombie. Maybe you could say that it's just how humans move after their soul's been ripped out...if it weren't for the fact that they start doing it in the moments before they tear out their soul. I don't feel like hunting down gifs and screenshots for this post, but if you watch them at the end of Chapter 1, there's this moment where they hold out their hand and open and close it a few times. Almost like they — or someone — is testing their control of it. Again, they never do this at any other point when they take over their own movements.
Related to this is the second point: two out of three times that this has happened, Kris has been hurled out of a dead sleep to do it. They quite literally get thrown out of bed/off the couch to shuffle around and create dark fountains. Speaking hypothetically, if you were an entity that could possess people, wouldn’t it be easiest to do it when they were sleeping? Their mind would be at its most defenseless, and they’d already lack full control of their body. That in itself isn’t direct evidence, but it’s worth noting.
What is direct evidence is the fact that Kris only ever rips out their soul after dark. And after finishing the game, if you’ve recruited enough Darkners from the Cyber World, you can talk to Seam again and they’ll say: “You don’t want to get caught when the sun goes down…”
The wording there feels very deliberate. Get caught. Like they know that something will “catch” Kris after sundown, something beyond their control. And sure enough, it does.
So Kris has been caught by someone who wants to create Dark Fountains. There’s only one person we know who wants to do that: the Knight. Worth noting is the fact that other characters refer to the Knight as “he,” not “they.” Given that pronouns are actually important in Toby Fox world, this indicates that Kris isn’t actually the Knight, just being controlled by him. (EDIT: Apparently I hallucinated this because the Knight is never referred to by any pronouns at all. I'm going to keep the he/him pronouns throughout the rest of this post, not because I think the Knight is necessarily a man, but as a quick way to differentiate them from Kris. I will refer to the Knight as they/them in all future posts.) So how come the first thing the Knight does is make Kris rip out their own soul? Because he doesn’t want you, the player, to interfere. Undertale introduced the idea that you can directly control a person via their Soul; now Deltarune is expanding on the concept, showing that you’re not the only one with this ability. The next few chapters of the game may very well involve you and the Knight struggling over your “vessel.” You want to use Kris’s power to seal the fountains; he wants to use that same power to create fountains.
I’m not one hundred percent sure who the Knight is yet, or how exactly he ended up getting control of Kris — maybe the fact that they canonically studied the occult has something to do with it. But I think I know why. Things are going to get a little more speculative than evidence-based here, so forgive me, but there are a few things to suggest that Kris isn’t the first pawn that the Knight has tried to open fountains with.
Queen mentions that only Lightners can open Dark Fountains. She learned this through the Knight, but what if the Knight learned it through trial and error? What if he tried to use Darkners to do his bidding first, but his attempts backfired?
This is where our trash friends Jevil and Spamton enter the picture. We know that long before we ever met them, they both encountered a mysterious person who caused them to begin seeing the nature of their reality, and that this knowledge drove them insane (albeit in different ways). There’s no hard evidence yet that the mysterious person was indeed the Knight, but if it was, maybe he thought that Jevil and Spamton could be used to open fountains for him, but whatever he did wound up breaking them. I could be completely wrong about this — even if the mysterious person was the Knight, he could have had a totally different reason for driving them both insane — but based on the information we currently have, I think it’s a possibility. It wouldn’t be just Jevil and Spamton who were his “test subjects,” either; Seam alludes to there being more Dark Crystal carriers, and thus more secret bosses.
But in the end, the Knight found out that Darkners couldn’t achieve what he needed them to achieve. This would also imply that he’s a Darkner, or that there’s some other reason why he can’t open fountains on his own; either way, he turned to Kris, and now he can take control of them. Just like we can.
But seriously, guys, Kris isn’t possessed by Chara in the Snowgrave route, so take some goddamn responsibility for your actions. That is all.
Ya I did! Actually I took my wife to see it for her birthday a couple weeks ago :)
Disney is definitely starting to improve on their female characters designs. Mirabel was a small but welcome step away from Keaneface, and am I forgetting something, or is she the first female lead character with glasses? There were a ton of female characters in the movie and they all looked different. Moms didn't look identical to daughters, the girl with super-strength was actually buff, and the one princess-esque girl was actually designed that way for a reason! Thanks for getting off your bullshit, Disney. Also loved the setting and the fact that the Latine characters had all different skin colors, including Afro-Latine. People say that criticizing these films doesn't make any difference, but between Frozen's release in 2013 and now, Disney has gone from "everyone is white" to "multiple movies without any white people." That's a huge change partly brought about by criticism. I hope that there are some little Latine kids out there who go watch this movie and finally see themselves represented!
I thought that the characters were particularly well-written and engaging (other people have realized that Bruno is the gay uncle, right?) but there were some plot points that could have used a bit more clarification. I wanted to know why Mirabel didn't get a gift. Like, I understand that the whole point was that she didn't need a gift to be special, but it really seemed like there should be a reason why her door faded away when she touched it. Maybe if we, for example, saw Abuela pressuring her even at her young age, setting up that Abuela's lofty expectations were going to have bad implications for the magic later? Because of the way it was presented, it just seemed like the Casita was fucking with Mirabel. Also, at the end, I kind of wanted her to get her own room in the Casita. Not powers — it's good that they didn't cop out and give her powers, and I respect that — but I just kept thinking about how she was stuck in the nursery. I feel like if she had a room, even if it was very normal inside, it could symbolize how now she's accepted by the family and there's a place for her in the home, even without powers.
Overall very strong movie and a nice step forward!
im watching Wicked again and wow the writers really did Elphaba dirty by slapping a hetero love interest on her when the narrative about her being a lesbian dealing with internalized homophobia was right the hell there huh
hot writing take, but if the first thing you say during a description of a female character is whether or not she’s attractive, you’re doing something wrong
@van-mun I’m responding to you personally because you’re my friend and you made your points thoughtfully and respectfully — if you’d prefer for me to make this private, just let me know.
Your interpretation is 100% valid, but I think it’s possible for people to have different interpretations for this show and none of them be entirely right or wrong, because it often has contradictory lore; I mean, it’s a cartoon. A cartoony cartoon. Lots of animated shows have solid continuity but IZ is actually kind of famous for its LACK of continuity, like the “bad endings” that just get ignored in the next episode.
Considering that Irken kids are snatched at birth and immediately pressed into service, I think it’s possible that a lot of the Irkens we see are younger than we might assume. I see Red and Purple as maybe 2-3 years older than Zim (I mean they’re pretty childish as well) and Tak as at least 5 years older, considering that she was going to take her Irken Elite test when it looked like Zim wasn’t even an invader yet. But again, that’s all personal speculation, it could technically go either way. For the most part I’m kind of going by how the characters feel emotionally, plus how they’re written. Zim feels like a kid to me, and I think that at least some of the writers would agree.
Going off of what I said in the tags before, in a situation where I want to ship two characters but the ages are unclear/unequal, normally the first thing I look at is the balance of power between the two characters. I’ll use two examples here, a good and a bad one.
GOOD: Sans & Toriel from Undertale. Toriel is implied to be much older than him, but both of them seem to be on similar ground as far as having an established worldview and emotional maturity. This ship isn’t really all that weird if you just look at age.
BAD: Jack & Ashi from Samurai Jack. Jack has been trapped in the future for 50 years, has a multitude more experiences than Ashi, and emotionally & mentally is much older than he looks. Ashi is quite young (in her 20s, maximum) and barely knows anything about the world or even about herself. Yeah, they’re both technically adults, but the imbalance of power here is kind of gross.
Zim and Dib, to me, seem to stand on similar ground. Both are similarly immature and inexperienced, both have a good idea of who they are, neither one seems more powerful than the other. And yeah, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s weird when one of the participants is a kid, but I honestly feel that Zim isn’t all that old. You know I’m a person who stands against pedophilia, and who is constantly analyzing the morality of different couples in animated media, and I genuinely don’t see anything wrong with Za//dr.
If you don’t like the ship or interpret things different, that’s cool, interpret how you want! We can agree to disagree. I’m not going to shove my ship into your face, and I doubt many people would. Blacklist tags, do whatever you need to do. But I’ve been over and over this in my head, and as the great overanalyzer of cartoons that I am, this is what I think, feel, and believe.
why are the majority of the zadr shippers 20+ like god i finally see why yall dont get why minors get uncomfortable bcus of it damn
ok my guy. im gonna be real generous and treat this like it’s not a mass message sent out to a bunch of people who just happen to post about za//dr, because if you were focused on me specifically, you would probably realize that i have been in the fandom for less than a month and know approximately three people and a corn chip. im not exactly a fucking pillar of the za//dr community here.
first of all, you’re talking about a ship that was basically pioneered by teenage fangirls. you know why a lot of za//dr shippers are in their 20s or older?? probably bc they were shipping it as children and have continued to ship it as they grew up. i can’t say that applies to everyone, it doesn’t apply to me after all, but from what I’ve seen the IZ community in general has been in the fandom for decades. also go look up any video from InvaderCon where the actors are doing za//dr fanservice, and you’ll hear a room full of teenage girls screaming.
oh, and you know why my age is in my profile? it’s not so that i can brag about being 24. it’s so that any minors who are uncomfortable about following adults for any reason can know how old i am and make smart choices for themselves from there.
as for za//dr being morally wrong, yall’s only basis that it’s anything resembling pedophilia is the (never-confirmed-as-canon) word of a man who also turned around and said that if he was going to rewrite the show with a romance in it, he would do a romance between Zim and Gaz. i’m not using this to attack za//gr shippers — i’m using this to show that we’re dealing less with a staunch anti-pedophilia advocate, and more with a dude who isn’t interested in consistency or emotional depth in his work. it’s his show, his choices, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with him wanting the show to be just a funny cartoon, but it’s kind of nonsensical to treat this as proof of the heinousness of za//dr when mr. jv is like this about pretty much any ship.
if za//dr makes you uncomfortable, or you just don’t like it, you have a multitude of options at your disposal. blacklist tags. unfollow blogs. don’t go into the za//dr tag. i understand that some shit is going to slip through the cracks, but most people tag their shit, me included. trying to get everyone to stop shipping za//dr forever is going to be a waste of your goddamn time. not that i can stop you from doing it — but assuming that this isn’t a mass message, i don’t know why you’re complaining to somebody with zero fandom influence, has never posted & doesn’t even reblog nsfw za//dr stuff, has straight up said that I don’t even like nsfw za//dr stuff (I see them both as kids and think nsfw is seriously ick) and drew one fucking picture of them holding hands. like damn if you’re gonna waste your time, might as well go waste it on someone who matters instead of me.
I’m Sure The Addams Family Film Itself Won’t Be Queerbaiting, But They Didn’t Need To Do That Beginning Part Of The Trailer: a novel by me that some of yall need to read
